Reviews/Music; Enveloped in Busoni

Liszt taught us that virtuosity could be a purely musical tool. To its virtues, Busoni added excess. As a compositional device, excess upends our musical values, and indeed Busoni's music leaves us unprepared and threatened, like passengers who have unwittingly chosen a rowboat in which to face a tidal wave.

The Busoni Piano Concerto -heard in a rare revival at Carnegie Hall on Friday evening - is a hymn to immoderation. Sonata and variation forms, counterpoint, theme and development are implosive styles. They teach us to cherish the concise. Excess, by definition, demands more room, and this concerto's five movements stretched almost an hour and a quarter into the night.

Length, however, is best measured not by the clock but against attention spans. Here at least a reversal of listening standards was necessary from one half of the concert to the other. At its start, we were asked to judge Mozart's E-flat Symphony (No. 39) by its reductive beauties and, later, Busoni for something quite the opposite. Yet if the listener chooses to play by its particular rules, this concerto becomes a powerful event.

The power takes the form of enveloping pressure. Some of it derives from the incessant heaping of bravura detail (''Up the keyboard, down the keyboard, bang,'' as Winthrop Sargeant once described Liberace). There is also the method of encrustation, whereby the fourth movement's sunny Italian theme is grotesquely weighted down by Busoni's orchestration.

Yet how wonderfully apt is the male chorus of the finale - a soothing, cleansing episode that appears just in time to mitigate the exaggeration that has come before. Beethoven's choral finale storms the heights; Busoni's gracefully retreats from them. In all, this was not an experience I long to repeat soon again, but Busoni's Piano Concerto is potent stuff, and it will rattle around in the mind of this listener for some time to come.

The success of virtuosity and excess depends largely on the performer's ability to disguise effort. Garrick Ohlsson's piano playing did so with admirable serenity, facing one acrobatic convolution after the other with seemingly fearless calm. We were indebted to him and to Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Orchestra.

The earlier Mozart playing was a model of cushioned sound. Balances were admirable, with Mozart's clarinet-heavy wind choirs warming Mozart's dark E-flat major sound but never obtruding. The legato playing had not a single sharp angle; accents were gently insinuated after the beat. There may be better orchestras and better conductors in this country, but as a pair Mr. Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Orchestra are our most gratifying symphonic experience.

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A version of this review appears in print on January 30, 1989, on Page C00012 of the National edition with the headline: Reviews/Music; Enveloped in Busoni. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe